With increasing development of high technology industries, computers and their peripheral devices become essential electronic apparatuses in our daily lives. Image pickup devices are widely used in notebook computers to take photographs or record video data in order to provide convenience to the human beings. For example, through the video conference, the users at different cities or countries could discuss with each other. When a network communication program is executed to perform a videoconferencing function, the image of a first user could be captured by a web camera of a computer system at a first terminal. By the network communication program, the image of the first user at the first terminal is transmitted to the computer system of a second user at a second terminal through internet connection. As such, the image of the first user could be outputted from the computer monitor or an image output device at the second terminal. Similarly, by the same manner, the image of the second user could be obtained by the web camera of the computer system at the second terminal and then transmitted to the first user at the first terminal. Under this circumstance, the videoconferencing technique will enable individual users in faraway sites to have meetings or communicate with each other.
FIG. 1 is a schematic view illustrating the use of a notebook computer having an image pickup device according to the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, the notebook computer 1 comprises a screen 10, an input device 11 (e.g. a keyboard or a touchpad) and an image pickup device 12. The image pickup device 12 is arranged on an upper edge of the screen 10 for capturing the environmental image at the user terminal. By using the notebook computer 1 and through internet connection, the user 2 could communicate with other users at different sites in order to have a video conference. Generally, the image pickup device 12 has a fixed shooting angle. Due to the fixed shooting angle, the shooting area of the image pickup device 12 is restricted by the narrow shooting angle. As shown in FIG. 1, only the environmental scene within the shooting area A1 could be effectively captured by the image pickup device 12.
For capturing the image of another environmental scene that exceeds the shooting area A1, the notebook computer 1 is usually equipped with an additional image pickup device. For example, the additional image pickup device is used to capturing the image of the environmental scene within the shooting area A2. The additional image pickup device increases the fabricating cost of the notebook computer 1 and occupies space of the notebook computer 1. For solving these drawbacks, a fisheye lens is used to replace the lens that originally used in the image pickup device 12 in order to increase the shooting area of the image pickup device 12. Since the image obtained by the fisheye lens is usually distorted, the application thereof is still unsatisfactory.